Births And Deaths

This paper names him John,
my mother called him Joe
when we were children
and she still talked to us.
Pneumonia killed him
in her parents’ home,
but eight months old,
his father written witness
to his death.
So short a time from joy to grief.

She never spoke of him again, his name interred in silent pain, dumbness with the deafness that isolated her. Somewhere surely there must be a grave unvisited for a century now, a silent place that holds some of the love she could not share.

Nineteen years later on that same date she bore me too remembering perhaps the day her first child died.